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Dear Brothers,

The General Council invited me to talk to you about the future of our Carmelite Order from the perspective of a “younger” member. I feel very honoured to speak before such a select audience as the General Congregation which in fact represents the whole Order, world-wide. This also makes me a little bit nervous and I beg your pardon if this comes across.

Talking about the future of Carmel could seem to be a very presumptuous undertaking, and under no circumstances do I want to appear as a prophet with definite and irrefutable insights about how we have to live as Carmelites of the 21st century. I would simply like to share with you my vision of a Carmelite lifestyle which I believe is based both on my personal experience of being a Carmelite for 16 years and on a more or less continual preoccupation with our specific Charism and spirituality which I love with all my heart. Neither do I want to bore you or bother you with an unreachable ideal but I‟d like to reach out to touch your Carmelite heart with some essential elements which are unique to our Charism and which I think we cannot give up but which we are invited to fill with our creativity and life, not in terms of perfection, but with the passion of those who know and have experienced that in their imperfection and weakness they are Gods beloved sons.

I‟m very conscious of the fact that I cannot speak on behalf of the whole younger generation of the Order and also that my perception of the Carmelites and of religious life is mainly that of a Western European point of view. Nevertheless I hope that the brothers from other parts of the world can adapt some of my remarks to their specific cultural situation.

First of all allow a few personal remarks about the community where I live at the moment because this experience has a great influence on what I‟m going to tell you about my vision of being a Carmelite now and in the future. Some eight years ago, together with three other brothers of my province, I had the extraordinary chance to establish a new foundation of our Province in Ohrdruf, a town quite close to Erfurt, the capital city of Thuringia in East Germany, where the communist regime of the German Democratic Republic had just collapsed. The intention of this new, small community was, and is, to live out very consciously and explicitly our Carmelite way of life in an area where more than 80% of the population is no longer Christian and where especially the Catholics are an insignificant minority of only 3% of the population. You can imagine that religious life in this region is only known from movies or history books. We live in a house of the diocese of Erfurt and are in charge of the small diaspora parish.

We see our main task in trying to realise our Carmelite Charism in openness to the people around us. So we give great importance to prayer by common celebration of the Eucharist and the liturgy of the hours, Lectio Divina and meditation and to fraternity. We invite people regardless of their belief, denomination and world view to share our life for a few days or weeks and we offer the opportunity for individual retreats, spiritual direction and counselling. For this purpose two of us completed various courses in spirituality and psychology. I did this with a licentiate in “Pastoral Psychology” at the Jesuit University in Frankfurt which consisted not only of theoretical studies but especially of practical training in self-awareness and pastoral-counselling. “Open to the future of God” General Congregation 1999 2

It was in the course of this formation that I learned to better discern my own motivation for entering religious life and especially my attraction to Carmelite spirituality which I am now more aware of being an invaluable source for spiritual and human growth. So this personal information is to make you aware of some of the background to my thoughts........